Chapter Two

Amelia stood in the doorway of her apartment and contemplated the past twelve hours of her life. She hadn't been back to her place since she left abruptly in the middle of the night to meet Natasha and the evidence showed just that.

There was the cup of coffee still sitting on the table where she had forgotten it (her version of liquid courage since it had been too early to break out the tequila). There were the random pieces of paper scattered around the floor where, in her frustration, she had pushed them off the dining room table. The state of her apartment very clearly showed the state of her mind when she had left: scattered and disorganized.

She took a few steps in, almost hesitantly, and fought very hard against the rock hard lump in her throat. She tried to pretend nothing was amiss, that Natasha hadn't just told her one of her best friends had died. She briefly wondered if she could still call him friend, after all, she had left them all behind.

Yes, she thought despondently. Steve would still consider them friends.

It made the crack in her heart splinter even further.

She knew what she had to do. She knew the steps she had to take to prepare to go back to that life. It didn't make the actual doing it any easier. What she really wanted to do, however, was dig back into her bed, throw the blanket over her head, and give in to the wave of sadness that hung over her.

Instead, she walked over to her computer and began the difficult task of severing all the connections she had made over the years. Her boss at the youth center where she worked received a perfunctory resignation email. Co-workers and casual acquaintances received an apology and vague explanation for her abrupt departure. She briefly considered calling the friends who had been more that just people she knew, but Natasha's last warning still rang in her mind.

Don't let personal attachments keep you from focusing on the endgame.

She swallowed the bitter feeling of shame and trekked on, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she methodically expelled from her life everyone who would notice her absence. There were more people than she had originally thought. Everyone who had helped fill the emptiness inside five years ago were now receiving nothing more than a line or two for their troubles.

But there was a group of people that made her stop.

Her kids, the youths she counseled on a daily basis, were going to prove a lot more difficult to cut out of her life. They had already been dealt a crappy hand, most of them coming from the streets or abusive homes, and now she was turning her back on them. There were other counselors who were more than capable of taking over, but she saw them as hers. Her responsibility, and now, another thing she was giving up.

Was that what she was going to be remembered? The woman who kept no promises and abandoned everything? It was what she deserved, at least.

But there was a reason now why she was uprooting her life again.

She felt a sharp pang of pain and felt her breath hitch. Not now, she thought desperately. Just hold on a little longer.

There was still one phone call to make and she needed her wits about her to get through it. She picked up her cell phone and dialed the number. For one hopeful second she thought no one would answer, that this painful task would be pushed back. If only for a little while.

"Hello, sweatheart," she heard from the other end, and her heart sank. "Shouldn't you be at work?"

Her mother's crisp and teasing tone brought another wave of sadness upon her. She'd had to make this call before, once, and the weight of her decision back then was still the thing she regretted the most.

"Ma." And she couldn't help it. The shake in her voice, the tremble in her lips, everything came out in that little word and her mother caught it.

"Amelia, what's wrong?"

She concentrated on breathing, on keeping the sobs reigned in until her mother could no longer hear them. She held on, barely. "Ma, I have to go."

"Go?" There was a pause. "Baby, you're not making any sense. What do you mean you have to go? Go where?"

"I have to go again, I have to leave." And this time her mother got it. She heard rustling over the phone, heavy breathing.

"Aaron! Get down here!" She heard her mother's panicked voice calling out for her dad and she knew she didn't deserved the loving and supportive parents she had. They certainly didn't deserve what she was doing to them. Again.

"Ma, listen." She took a deep breath and tried to get her mother's attention once more. "Ma, please. You have to listen to me."

"Don't do this, Amelia." Her mother's voice was small and pleading. Amelia knew if she didn't get off the line soon, if she didn't keep this phone call under two minutes, she would give in. She would tell her mother the truth (the real truth, not the "truth" she had given her last time) and that was something she couldn't risk. She was the poster child of what happened when someone knew too much.

"I can't talk for too long, but you have to listen. It's very important that you and dad follow the same rules as last time."

"But-"

"No, Ma. Just listen." Amelia clenched her eyes shut, counted her breaths before she continued. "You can't try to find me. You can't call me, you can't call the cops, you can't talk to anyone about this." Another deep breath. "You have to pretend I fell off the face of the planet."

"Baby, you're asking for the impossible." She knew her mother was crying, could almost feel the grief through the cell phone. "We're your parents. We can't ever stop looking for you, even if we can't understand why you left."

"You have to. You both do. I know apologizing is not going to ever be enough, but it's all I can give you right now. Maybe someday I can finally tell you why, but for now, you have to do this." It wasn't the whole truth, Amelia knew. There was never going to be a day when she could tell her parents the real reason, but that was something her mother didn't have to know at the moment.

"Amelia, please. You have no idea what we went through five years ago. You have no idea how hard it was to know you went through something horrible and we couldn't ask what. Don't put us through that again, baby."

"I'm sorry. I am so sorry. I can't explain and I can't ask you to understand. But please do what I ask. No phone calls. No visits. Nothing." Amelia could hear her father's voice in the distance, her mother's cry bringing him out of his study. "Please tell daddy I love him and I'm sorry."

She hung up before she changed her mind. Before she completely broke down and begged her parents to come to her and make everything better. She held the phone tightly and quickly pressed the power button until the screen went black. The hardest part was done.

And now she could grieve.

She made it to her bedroom, kicking her shoes off along the way, and threw herself on the bed, pulling the blanket around her and holding it tight. The sobs she had kept inside her never came. Instead, she shivered uncontrollably, her teeth rattling. She wondered, briefly, why she was really doing this. If it was worth it.

Steve Rogers' face lingered in her mind, his eyes warm and his smile friendly.

The other face came too. His. Eyes filled with contempt and lips that hardly smiled.

James Buchanan Barnes.

She finally allowed herself to think his name, to allow her memories to roam free. The conversations, the fleeting touches, and the fights. Oh yes, their fights had been intense. They could bring down buildings with just their screaming matches. But that was then.

If Steve Rogers was dead, then how was his best friend holding up?

If she could help to keep him from crossing the line he danced on, didn't she own him, them, to try? It's what Steve would have wanted, that she knew for sure.

And that's why she was doing it, in the end. She still remembered, with perfectly clarity, the last words Steve Rogers ever spoke to her.

Do what you have to do, kid, but don't ever turn your back on friends.

On the other side of town, in a nondescript motel, a man and a woman sat in front of a laptop, quietly watching the screen.

"Gotta say you taught her well, Nat," the man said, an eyebrow raised. The words on the screen scrolled down as the red head continued tapping at the keyboard. "I figured she would have broken down before she even got to the parents."

"Then you haven't been paying attention, Clint. That girl has ice in her veins." Natasha looked up and grinned. "But I agree with you. The callousness in those emails is pure me."

Clint Barton got up from his sitting position and stretched, walking over to the mini fridge. He pulled a water out and gulped half of it before he seemingly realized something.

"I'm more curious as to how you managed to pull her back in at all." He gave the redhead a searching look. "Without revealing compromising information, that is."

Natasha hesitated, her eyes on the screen to avoid looking into her partner's face. She had lied her way into high official's private quarters. She had used her knowledge to take down tyrants and topple down regimes. She had taken multiple assailants on hand to hand combat and had come out on top.

But the man before her was her weakness. There was nothing that he couldn't take just by looking in her eyes. If he was asking then he already knew.

"I told her about Steve. Well, the short of it, anyway."

"Jesus, Nat. That wasn't your information to give."

"It worked, didn't it? You weren't there, Clint. I could see she wasn't going to come on her own. She needed to be pushed in that direction." Natasha wasn't used to explaining her actions, having worked solo for much of her career. But Clint wasn't a superior demanding an explanation for a perceived mistake.

He was her partner.

Clint rubbed his face and sighed. "How did she take it? They had become unusually close towards the end."

Natasha gestured towards the laptop, Amelia's emails still on full display. "She's saying goodbye. That's how she took it."

Clint began pacing around the room. He was never one to sit still. "Still, Nat. Not everyone is going to be happy about this. Tony, for one, was pissed we let her go to begin with."

"Stark gets pissed if his coffee gets too cold." The redhead shrugged, not bothered with her partner's words. "We need her."

"We needed her last time, too. What makes you think she won't turn her back again and run away."

Natasha stood up and walked towards the window, peeking behind the curtain. It was mostly out of habit; she had personally taken care of the security checks herself. There was no one in the motel parking lot except a few guests and their children unloading their belongings from their car.

"For one, she wasn't threatened to work for us this time. She chose to come back and that should make a difference." She turned back to her partner and leveled a knowing stare at him. "For another, there's Bucky."

"Are you sure there's still something there? It's been five years after all."

"She wouldn't even say his name," Natasha countered. She knew something so trivial shouldn't have convinced her, but she had been doing this for a long time. People had a tendency to say more where they said nothing at all. It was human nature.

"I hope you're right, Nat. We're risking a lot for a gut feeling." Clint wasn't in the business of doubting his partner, but he also wasn't in the business of bringing back deserters. And he had done both today.

"We've risked a lot more for a lot less," was the response, and Clint couldn't argue with that.

"What's the plan, then? We don't have the team's resources for a clean extraction this time. Somebody's bound to miss her and get trigger happy to call the cops."

"I really am worried about you, Clint," Natasha teased. "Age must be getting to you. Surely you didn't come this far on the assumption we didn't have a plan. You gotta give me a little more credit than that."

"Sometimes I do think I'm getting too old for this." Clint began stretching exaggeratedly. "All my bones popping and my joints creaking. Definitely a sign I need to buy a farm somewhere and retire."

"The day you hang up your hat I'll be right there with you, Barton, farm and all. But I know I still have a few years left in me. In both of us."

"Sure, sure." He smiled softly and the redhead returned it. "But no geese. Our farm will be a goose free environment."

They began packing up, silently, when they were convinced that the woman they were observing digitally had done everything to their satisfaction.

There was a silent agreement not to bring up the farm dream again, not aloud, and certainly not to anyone else. They both knew it was what it was, just a dream.

There would be no retirement, no secluded farm out in a remote part of the country. That was just the life that they had agreed to lead, to carry the obligation of the mission (missions) to the end.

And if Natasha felt a tingle of guilt at being the driving force in bringing an innocent back into the fold, well, she certainly had the training to keep it from rising to the surface.

...

A/N: Once again, forgive any mistakes (letting me know is better) and hope you enjoy.